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Tag Archives: Work/Play

I had the chance to sit down with self-described serial entrepreneur and long-time Internet industry vet, Tristan Louis (@TNLNYC) on the first full day of Social Media Week New York. We talked Keepskor, his new product that provides building blocks for effective game building, entrepreneurship, and work vs. play.

What traits do you think make a strong entrepreneur who can stay relevant?Grit. When you’re building a company, whether it’s one or many…you end up hitting the ditch on a regular basis. The start-up life looks like this but really it’s more ups and downs. Your ability to work through setbacks is what’s going to differentiate the successful entrepreneur and the unsuccessful one. Because the successful entrepreneur sees that and still powers through and is still positive…and gets the whole team to get back on the positive track of “Yes, we can solve this.”

Tell me more about Keepskor, and what role that plays in the social gaming space?At Keepskor, we’re marrying gaming with social in a way that hasn’t been done before, in that we are building a social network where individuals or brands can build games without writing a single line of code, share them, and play them with friends. And so inherently, we’ve gone back to the mechanism of how people gathered around the board game…and created building blocks for building games.

There are two things we do in life. We either play or we work; and everyone’s been focused on work, but very few people have been looking at play as a way to engage with things. And our view is that play is the best way to engage an individual. So, when it comes to advertising, to do so through a game experience, leads to a better retention of message…and better empathy between an individual and a brand…Everyone should have fun, and that is where game enabling has huge potential.

What do you see as the future for Keepskor?At Keepskor our tagline is that we look to unleash the creative power of play. So, we’re leveraging games, to get people to be more creative: to start new companies, find new ways to solve problems, really turning the whole world into a game. I mean, you look at a kid today…and they’re playing and discovering the world through play. And the whole educational system and the whole work system is slated in a way, to try to drive that out of people. And so we’re trying to reverse that trend. On a global basis, if Keepskor becomes the most successful we would ever hope it to be, then by the time we’re done, everyone would be having fun and playing and that balance of work vs. play would be shifted. People would be more productive and the economy would be more efficient, through play instead of work. On the more basic level, we’re looking for Keepskor to be the LinkedIn of play.

Claire Meyer is an NYU senior studying Integrated Marketing and Web Programming. You can find her on Twitter at @CMeyer4. Claire is one of our SMW Press Corps members, managed by OpenCommunications. Learn more here.